Evagrius and others have a psychological description of how these inner videos are generated. There is within us a sort of mental craving that is fragmented and frayed (pathos was the Greek word he often used), with the result that we are nearly always either grasping at something or pushing it away and find it very difficult to receive with open palms of simple gratitude.
What happens when this mental craving grasps some thought or image? The videos are produced, and “we run to see them.” Saint Hesychios says, “As soon as this thought appears in our intellect, our thoughts chase after it and become embroiled with it.” It should not be underestimated how quickly this happens. You can be perfectly content with your Mac Powerbook. This is it! It’s everything you could want in a computer. Then the MacBook appears and suddenly, This is it! It’s everything you could want in a computer. And so you massage your budget to manage this purchase. Now you’ve just seen MacBook Air. This is it! Such simplicity of line. It fits into a manila envelope. It’s everything you could want in a computer. So it goes. And we find ourselves returning to the Apple store like a dog to a fire hydrant.
Analysis of the lightning-quick subtleties of chatter-fueled distraction and its ability to split, fray, and knot desire is typical of the desert psychology of the early Christian centuries. Though the language and perspective may at times seem dated, the dynamics are strikingly accurate. Someone, for example, turns down your invitation to dinner, and immediately a stream of inner commentary breaks loose: “They don’t like me I suppose. Nobody likes me. I’ve never had any true friends in my whole life. Not ever. I’ll never ask anybody over again.” Somebody walks into a room carrying a Gucci bag that you yourself cannot afford but crave nonetheless, and immediately the mind comments, “Doesn’t she look silly carrying that thing? Just look at her! What on earth does she think she’s doing with that?” The inner chatter is not only concerned with silly things; it can generate quite a lot of suffering. This suffering requires mental noise to make it seem real. And soon we’ve given it the keys to the car.
Mental craving acts like a whisk that quickly froths things up into foamy obsession. Evagrius famously says in his Praktikos that this can happen in one of eight ways (or a combination thereof). The eight afflictive thoughts are gluttony, impurity, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride. In other writings he mentions anxiety, envy, judgmentalism, and resentment as well. It is never a question of somehow managing never to have any of these kinds of thoughts. It is subtler than that. Evagrius is suggesting that there are certain areas of life where obsessive patterns tend to occur. Some pertain to more basic things, such as anxiety over our material welfare (gluttony or avarice, for example), while others pertain to a more rational dimension, such as anxiety over what people think of us (vainglory). He pinpoints certain areas of life in which inner noise, anxiety, confusion are frothed up by the mind’s whisk with the result that we become out of touch with reality. If we are out of touch with reality, we are at the same time out of touch with ourselves, with others, and with God.
Evagrius sees our relationship with food to be one such area, but it has much more to do than merely with what we eat. If we think for a moment how obsessed our culture is with how our bodies appear to others, this does not seem so far-fetched. And when our life coaches and personal trainers shore up their salaries by telling us how good we look, the nostrils of our gratitude flare condescendingly at all those mountainously overweight people. “Haven’t they ever looked in a mirror?” we ask ourselves. It is easy to see what Evagrius is getting at when he says these afflictive thoughts can team up with each other.
In her memoir of her battle with an eating disorder, Margaret Bullet-Jonas recounts how bulimia ushered her into a world of chaotic fragmentation in order to illustrate the crippling isolation of mind-tripping gone out of control.
“The language of compulsive overeating,” she writes, is tragically jumbled and ineffective, as multi-toned and multi-voiced as Cerberus, the dog who stands at the threshold of hell in Greek mythology, each of its three heads barking independently. A person who stands at the brink of addictive behavior is listening intently to conflicting inner voices…. It would all begin with a small seductive voice that made promises it couldn’t keep. “Here, I’ll take care of you,” it would murmur in my ear. “I see you’re feeling a bit down. Let’s just comfort ourselves with a bite to eat, shall we?”
“Oh no, not again,” another inner voice would object in alarm. ”I’m not going to eat right now….”
“Hey, you don’t have to feel that sadness. Don’t give in to it. Leave it alone. Come with me. Let’s go see what’s in the pantry. Just a little something to eat, that’s all you need.”
A student in one class who, due to bipolar disorder, struggled more than most with inner chatter, knew this cacophony well, and reminded the class one day that Cerberus guards the door not only to keep people from entering but also to keep people from leaving. The noise generated by our inner commentaries, many of them hidden, heightens the sense of isolation and inhibits the ability to reach out to others.
What is wrong with scratching the thighs of our inner chatter until they are reddened, chapped, or torn by bitten fingernails of obsession? Whether scratching the thighs of resentment, anguish, old pain, or simply chewing the cud of all the silly cartoons that bounce around in our heads, surely this constant talking, talking, talking to ourselves is perfectly normal. Yes, it is normal, if we call normal a lifetime of believing we are separate from God. This is what most of us experience much of the time. Yet this utterly convincing, self-alienating sense of reactive separation from God is precisely what interior noise generates and sustains.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
